He’ll Take You Almost All The Way There….

We used my (fairly new) Garmin Street Pilot c550 GPS for the trip down to Las Cruces, New Mexico and back. The device was quite helpful as it always put us in the general area of where we were going. The shortcomings were:

Three times it put me in the wrong lane to get onto the freeway (“In point two miles turn right onto eye-forty.” When it was a left turn…).

Twice I was instructed to make a left turn at an intersection when there was no way to go left!

Twice I was told to turn one way at an intersection to go to my final destination when in reality the address was the other way.

Three times I was told I was at the destination when in reality the address was two or three hundred yards further down the road.

On the other hand, I would not have found my way around Las Cruces as easily as we did without the GPS. Before leaving Pocatello I programmed in the addresses for the motels where we were planning to stay along with the addresses for Aunt LaRella, Delon, and the Church where the funeral was being held. That made getting around town much easier than trying to drive and read a map. The GPS always got us close enough (athough I did have to make a few U turns when the device had it’s right and left mixed up). In fact, Uncle Nate and Aunt Sharon (actually, Sharon did all the driving. Uncle Nate is legally blind) followed us to a couple of places after Sharon got themselves thoroughly lost in Las Cruces last Tuesday night.

The device was also fairly accurate as to what time we would arrive at our next destination. As soon as it calculates the route, it displays the expected arrival time. It was always within a couple of minutes of being right, which is pretty amazing given traffic, traffic lights, and road conditions.

Now that I’ve used this device on a long road trip, I want to go look at all of the available GPS devices to see what features they might have. Maybe there is one out there that would qualify for a better song.